The For the People Act was not expected to pass the evenly divided Senate. Many outlets expressed shock while both sides toed predictable party lines.
Summary
One of Congressional Democrats top legislative priorities was stopped in its tracks by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans Tuesday evening.
- The procedural vote to begin debate on the For The People Act, a gigantic elections reform bill fell 10 votes short, effectively killing the bill entirely, after a straight party-line vote in an evenly divided Senate.
- The vote has prompted fresh calls from the Democratic Party to end the legislative filibuster in the Senate, a move moderate Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema insists is a terrible idea.
- Despite coming out against the bill a few weeks ago, Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Machin announced he had reached a deal with Senate Democrat leadership to advance the bill just a few hours before the vote.
- According to President Biden, “election reform” is a “generational civil rights issue.”
- Huffington Post declared it a leading question for Senate Democrats: Do they ditch the filibuster to pass paradigm-shifting bills or “protect the filibuster over the right to vote in states run by Republicans.”
- CNN reported that with the vote killing the For the People Act, Democrats have to pin their hopes on fundamentally altering how elections are administered with the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
- The Washington Post flourished with pro-Democrat rhetoric, saying the bill would “revamp the architecture of American democracy”, and that’s just the first sentence of the article. They further cast the legislative fight as an effort to stave off “the dire state of American democracy.”
- Before the vote happened, Vox acknowledged the reality that even if the filibuster could have been defeated on the procedural vote, without the support of Manchin and Sinema, the bill was going nowhere fast.
- Fox News, as a mirror opposite to the Washington Post’s DNC sycophancy, ran almost exclusively with reasons for Republican opposition to the bill, information completely lacking in mainstream and left-leaning reporting.
- The Daily Wire centered their reporting on the debate over the filibuster, saying despite it now being called “racist in an attempt to pressure senators to abolish it,” Democrats “repeatedly used the filibuster to stop Republicans” and Trump.
- National Review highlighted the efforts for Democrat unity, and several top Democratic names “shifting their opinion on voter ID” recently.
- Sinema’s op-ed was the focus of Hot Air’s coverage this morning, praising the Democrat for making “a compelling argument” that ending the filibuster will result in Republicans using it to their advantage when they have control of the Senate.
Author’s Take
The result of the Senate vote was known for days, yet the mainstream media grasped for straws in their attempt to inject the drama needed for a drawn-out bid for ratings.
Publications on the left are wringing their hands, screaming in the wind about how racist the filibuster, but they have lost all credibility: they refuse to acknowledge the fact that Senate Democrats used the filibuster 327 times in 2020 alone.
One interesting wrinkle: publications on the more philosophically extreme ends of the spectrum, Vox and Hot Air, had the most pragmatic takes on the situation.
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© Dallas Gerber, 2021
